With Gratitude
It’s become a bit of a tradition at Hub Designs and on this blog to reflect on what I’m grateful for on Thanksgiving Day (see our 2007 and 2009 entries).
This year, I’ve got to start with my wife Mary. No entrepreneur has ever had a wife more supportive and understanding than she has been since I left Dun & Bradstreet and founded Hub Designs in 2007 as a consulting firm focused on MDM and data governance. She’s been there through all of the ups and downs, and has given me great advice and counsel through it all. I’m grateful too for our sons, Conor and Brendan – quite literally, the lights of my life.
I’m grateful to all of our clients – without you, of course, we’d literally be nowhere. The Hub Designs team works hard for our clients, but that’s because you inspire us, evoke our passions, and appreciate our efforts. We are grateful for your trust in us, and we will always do our best for you.
To everyone on the Hub Designs team – I’m grateful for your hard work and persistence. We formally launched our Thought Leadership practice this year and it’s been very successful, with several clients signing up for our services in writing white papers, conducting webinars, and providing guidance on using social media.
Lastly, I’m grateful to everyone who reads or participates in what we’re calling the Hub Designs Network:
- The Hub Designs Web Site
- The Hub Designs Blog
- The Hub Designs “Best Practices in MDM” Newsletter
- My social media accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook
- The MDM Community, a social network of MDM practitioners with 380+ members from 31 countries
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who reads this blog, our newsletter, my articles in Information Management magazine and The Data Warehousing Institute, or who is connected with me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or The MDM Community. When I started Hub Designs as a consulting firm, I had no idea how much writing I would be doing, or how much I would come to enjoy it.
The reason I enjoy it so much, of course, is the great feedback I get from an engaged readership. I try to keep my writing authentic, honest and objective, and to put myself in your shoes. “What would I want to read, if I was trying to learn about master data management or data governance? What questions would I have?” So of course, it’s great when you write in with your actual questions. You’re always welcome to do just that – simply use the Contact Us selection on the blog menu.
So here’s hoping you had a relaxing, peaceful and happy Thanksgiving Day, with plenty of turkey, stuffing and family to go around!
Confessions of a Social Networker
I’ve been writing for Information Management magazine for two years now, and my latest column “Confessions of an Active Social Networker” is available at http://www.information-management.com/issues/20_2/confessions-of-an-active-social-networker-10017314-1.html.
It tells the story of how I’ve used blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in my professional life over the past few years, and gives some tips on how people can apply some of those ideas in their careers.
Building your personal brand, whether it be in master data management and data governance, or in any other area of business or technology, is a matter of knowing your stuff, and letting other people get to know you and your voice. Having something to say in a distinctive way, adding some value, taking a stand, being a good source of information, being entertaining, being concise – all those things are helpful.
Today, there are so many sources of information – all literally at our fingertips. People are looking for someone that can help them cut to the chase – assess new technology, help them learn something new quickly, understand different schools of thought on complex topics, synthesize and present ideas from both business and technology to both management and technical audiences.
If you can do that, you’ll attract an audience. Small at first, of course. But a blog, a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter and Facebook account, perhaps a YouTube channel – these cost almost nothing but your time. But the time you invest will pay tremendous dividends down the road. Not overnight, of course. And perhaps not in cash deposited to your bank account. But in credibility, in relationships, in marketing exposure, in reinforcing your message, in personal branding, in networking – the effects are undeniable.
I still meet people and companies who shrug social media off or who just “don’t get” blogging. Corporations who are passing up an incredibly valuable and cost effective way to engage in dialog with their customers and potential customers. People who have a wealth of knowledge to share but don’t take the time. So much untapped potential in the world. But I see the growth figures mentioned in the article in Information Management, and I think people are starting to catch on. Our corporate blog gets three times the traffic as our web site. And we’ve had clients hire us specifically because they’ve read a number of the articles on the blog and have told us “we can tell that you know your stuff”.
So if anyone challenges you on the ROI of blogging or social media, send them to me – I’ve got a few good anecdotes I can tell them.
With Gratitude
I’ve been getting a number of “Happy Thanksgiving” e-mails today, and they’re very nice. But they’ve prompted me to think about all of the things I have that I need to grateful for, as this year starts to winds to a close.
First, my family. It’s hard having an entrepreneur as a husband and father. I have spent more time this year in hotel rooms and clients’ offices than at home, and for that I’m sorry. Hopefully the new year will see me spending more time in the Boston area than on the road, and being more present in all of your lives. And I’m hoping the sacrifices we’ve all made in building this business will continue to pay dividends in 2010 and beyond.
Second, our clients. They’ve been great this year. As usual, I won’t name names here. But you know who you are, and you know how grateful we are that you are working with us. We try to work hard for you and to always make your projects a success, but we recognize that you’re right there with us, working hard and investing yourselves in our success.
Third, our people and team members. It is a privilege to work with you. Every day, I learn something from you. Some of the best times in my professional career have been this year (some of the hardest too!). But I always learned something, and I thank you for taking the time to teach me. It is always interesting.
Lastly, to everyone who reads our web site, this blog, our newsletter, our magazine articles, who caught one of our speaking engagements this year, or who joined the MDM Community – thank you! The extended community that Hub Designs is part of is very special to me. People that I run into at conferences, or that send me e-mails offering to connect me with people they know, or that reach out to me through LinkedIn, or that read my postings on Twitter, are all very important to me.
A few years ago, before I really knew the value of social networking, I didn’t understand it and thought it was a little frivolous. Now, I understand its power – to connect us to one another, to effect change, to weave people and companies together in a new way, to make the 21st century more intimate, to allow me to sit in my office and say thank you to thousands of people at once, without blasting a newsletter into people’s inboxes, without sending out a mailing, without placing an ad, without doing any of the traditional things companies would have done at one time to get their message across (and are still doing).
Today, to me, it’s all about authenticity, and helping people, and being in the right place at the right time. And for that, I’m grateful.
D&D Computers One, Best Buy Zero
I had a laptop “near death experience” over the past few days. It actually started on Saturday (which was Halloween). So I guess that makes this a “Halloween Hard Drive Horror Show”.
First, my Sony Vaio, which I’ve had for two years, got a little wobbly. Windows Vista wanted to run the dreaded CHKDSK utility. Things went down hill from there very quickly.
Monday night, I went back to my hotel room after working at my client’s offices all day, and the laptop refused to boot up at all. I gave it my best “I am not a techie” try, and realized this was not something I was going to be able to resolve on my own. No problem, I thought. I bought this laptop at Best Buy and was smart enough (I thought) to purchase a three-year extended warranty at the time (for an additional $600).
So yesterday morning, I showed up when the local Best Buy opened their doors, with my service plan number in hand. After a brief wait, I spoke with a member of the Geek Squad. He regretted to inform me that neither hard drive failure or reinstalling Windows Vista were covered by my extended warranty. But they were kind enough to let me borrow their Yellow Pages.
I got really lucky finding D&D Computers in Huber Heights, Ohio.
Brian Dean, the Chief Tech, told me to come right over. I got there a little after 11:00 am, and was there until just after 4:00 pm. Brian took extremely good care of me and my laptop. At my request, he replaced my failing 150 GB hard drive with a brand new 500 GB drive, bumped my RAM up from 2 GB to 4 GB, and installed Windows 7 on the new drive.
I had to reinstall all of my applications, which took a few hours last night. But to be back up and running in less than 24 hours, and to have gotten a major laptop upgrade out of all this, was a great outcome. I even got my old hard drive installed in a little enclosure so I could hook it up to my laptop using a USB cable, to access all of my data.
The total cost was $885 ($321 at Staples for the full version of Windows 7 Professional, $500 at D&D Computers for the new hard drive, new RAM and their labor, and $64 at Best Buy for the USB drive enclosure).
The moral of the story: read the fine print of your extended warranty, let your fingers do the walking and make sure you’re current on backing up your hard drive!
Building a Next Generation Business using AIA
This afternoon at Oracle OpenWorld, I attended a great session led by Darrin Pohlman, Enterprise Architect at LexisNexis and MK Rizwan from Infosys.
They talked about the enterprise transformation program at LexisNexis, and the strategic use of technology to enable and drive that transformation effort.
MK started by pointing out the constraints of the single, global instance application strategy. You’re constrained by the vendor’s application architecture, and not all the functionality is best-of-breed across the entire suite. There are inevitable customizations and extensions which pile up over time, which leads to ever-increasing Total Cost of Ownership. It’s difficult to introduce industry-specific functionality, and it takes a long time to introduce new business models or capabilities.
The trend recently has been toward unbundling of the packages through SOA integration such as Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture (AIA) and the accompanying Process Integration Packs (PIPs). Further trends include vendor consolidation – Oracle acquiring Siebel, Hyperion, BEA, etc.
Interestingly, MK mentioned the important of prioritizing master data management, which got my attention, and he mentioned that would be particularly as people started to migrate in the future to the Fusion Applications products.
They went on to talk about AIA, particularly foundation packs, process integration packs and direct integrations. The foundation pack provides shared services, design patterns and standards. It runs on Fusion Middleware.
Darrin discussed the pro’s of AIA: good reference model for building composite applications, standards-based, extensible for unique characteristics of your business, and where Oracle is eager to demonstrate successful implementations. On the con side, PIPs can be tightly coupled, and the versioning of the AIA foundation pack can depend on specific versions of Siebel and other Oracle applications. Also, there are change management considerations of the IT team. There are licensing and maintenance considerations as well.
LexisNexis is an early adopter of this technology but has to plan for multiple upgrades over the next 12-18 months.
The audience was very engaged and asked some great questions during the session.
I found the session very helpful in better understanding the underlying enterprise architecture and technology strategy that LexisNexis is pursuing, and how Oracle’s Application Integration Architecture fits into that strategy, and Darrin and MK did a great job in explaining the pro’s and con’s of the approach and the experience that LexisNexis has had with it so far.
“Just Call Oracle”
Oracle showed a funny video today in Thomas Kurian’s keynote address on Day 2 of Oracle OpenWorld.
Using a fictional company with lots of systems and applications issues, Thomas walked everyone through how Oracle would solve a lot of those problems.
There were some great customer cameos from companies like Ingersoll-Rand and Office Depot. It was a little on the sales-y side, as Oracle keynotes can sometimes be, but it was well done and wasn’t over the top.
This session was a good reminder of the breadth and depth of Oracle’s offerings in the technology and applications space, and frankly it made my head hurt. I’m glad that Hub Designs specializes in master data management – the Oracle universe has gotten so big, it’s a little overwhelming for most people.
I’ll write more later today on the MDM track sessions.
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I wanted to let you know that the easiest way to stay current with the Hub Designs blog is via Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
Under the “About” section on the left, click on the RSS icon or the “Subscribe to our feed” link. Then, in the top right corner of the page, click on your preferred news reader. You can also get the feed delivered via e-mail.
By subscribing via RSS, you’ll receive updates as soon as they’re published, and you’ll be able to mark the articles that you’ve already read, so you can focus just on the ones you haven’t read.
Of course, we’re very happy whether you choose to read the blog via http://blog.hubdesigns.com or via an RSS reader. But I did want to make sure you knew that the option was available.
To Our Readers – Thank You and Happy Holidays!
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A sincere “thank you” to everyone who reads this blog. We just had our best day, week and month ever – all on the same day, thanks to you.
Happy Holidays to everyone, and have a prosperous and healthy New Year!
With Gratitude
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There are many challenges in starting a new consulting company, and in being in a fast-growing space like Master Data Management. But there are many rewards as well.
Rewards like our great clients, and our wonderful team members – Tim, Gaurav, Eric and you-know-who!
I’ve been touched over and over this year by how many people have helped us out along the way – sending us referrals, new potential team members, good advice, all kinds of breaks and thoughtful gestures.
Hopefully we’ll all still be around long after the “early adopter” stage of the MDM phase is over. And certainly we’re planning for Hub Solution Designs to be around for a long, long time. But I will never forget the countless kindnesses that people have done for me, my family and our team members this year.
Earlier today, I was thinking about writing an “end of year” state-of-the-company article, and I still may do that when we get a little closer to New Year’s Day.
But for now, I just wanted to say “thank you” – to my wife Mary, to my boys Conor and Brendan, to my good friends Tim and Gaurav, and to all of the people who’ve touched our lives this year. To be healthy, to have people in my life who put up with my faults and bring out the best in me, to be able to do something new, to help companies improve, to have the freedom to be an entrepreneur, to be able to make mistakes and learn from them — all of these things are enormous blessings, and today of all days, I’m very grateful.
Happy holidays to all of our readers and to the friends of the firm – may your New Year be prosperous and happy!
